X-ing out Dowd
By Bernard Chapin
web posted March 21, 2005
Once again, just when I thought I was out of the Dowd critiquing
business, the overpaid, maligno-verbal columnist at The New
York Lies brought me back with today's blather entitled "X-
celling Over Men." This may be her bitterest offering to date, but
configuring a bitterness quotient for Maureen is about as effective
as separating out which home runs hit in 1998 were strictly a
product of steroid usage.
Dowd's first lines showcase her ubiquitous astringency:
Men are always telling me not to generalize about them. But a
startling new study shows that science is backing me up here.
Research published last week in the journal Nature reveals that
women are genetically more complex than scientists ever
imagined, while men remain the simple creatures they appear.
It's hard to believe that anything like this would appear in a major
newspaper even one that is the American version of the
Frankfort School for Political Correctness. Such a paragraph is
hate speech and little else. If a man wrote or said something like
that about women he would be fired from The Times or any
other newspaper. With the likes of Maureen out there in the
mainstream media, it is more appropriate to talk about a glass
floor than a glass ceiling (although I have yet to read another
columnist of either sex who is as obtuse as Dowd).
The message she delivers today is not unusual as Dowd holds
nothing but contempt for men. She makes mention of recent
evidence suggesting that the Y chromosome is simpler than the X
chromosome, and states that this causes women have more
abundant expression of their genes than men. She concludes that
this is why they are the more complex sex and that, "[t]he
discovery about women's superior gene expression may answer
the age-old question about why men have trouble expressing
themselves: because their genes do."
As if the concluding lines are not ugly enough, she then reveals
post-chromosomal rage by taking several gratuitous digs at men.
Dowd facetiously states that "men could disappear, taking
Maxim magazine, March Madness and cold pizza in the morning
with them." She further adds that the Y chromosome,
"…has inspired cartoon gene maps that show the belching gene,
the inability -to-remember-birthdays-and-anniversaries gene, the
fascination-with-spiders -and-reptiles gene, the selective-
hearing-loss-‘Huh' gene, the inability-to- express-affection-on-
the-phone gene."
I'm sure that many a reader dismisses all of this twaddle with "it's
meant to be cute, relax" or "she's so dumb who cares" or "let her
wallow in her own depression and agitation. Really Bernard,
how would you like to have a personality like that, let it go," but,
sadly, I cannot.
I suppose that I should be grateful not to be sharing her skin, but,
honestly, her base position hinges on such an obvious non-
sequitur that it's surprising it got past the editor. Even if women
express more genes than men it hardly matters as the amount of
genes expressed are not reflective of superiority. We know this
to be true because rice (yes, that's right, the plant) may well have
more genes than human beings. It seems that in regards to this
topic, as opposed to Dowd's broken elevator fantasies, size
does not actually matter. She made a blatantly fallacious position
the centerpiece of yet another rant deriding half of our species.
Besides, even if men were more simple than women, it hardly
would be an insult. Synonyms for simple include,
"straightforward, uncluttered, absolute, austere, classic, homey,
humble, inelaborate, unadorned, unadulterated, unaffected," and
"rustic." With my unpretentious tongue, I will gladly plead guilty
to all charges.
Besides, does anyone really believe that women are more
complicated than men? The evidence contradicts such an
assumption. Writers like Eugene O'Neill, Dostoevsky, Kafka,
Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner were all men and "simple" would
not be any way to describe them. The same could be said
regarding Van Gogh, Gauguin, David or Jackson Pollack. To
pretend that males are a primitive horde of channel flippers is
absurd and it also ignores the gender of the person who invented
the television–and practically everything else for that matter. Only
a person who is completely detached from the world would
maintain that women have a monopoly on complexity.
I've been reading Dowd's columns for the last three years and it
strikes me that she is not merely a spoiled upper class flake. Oh
she is that, but she also is representative of the one hundred
percent fantasist approach to behavioral interpretation. This
mindset is best encapsulated in the phrase, "[t]here cannot be
anything wrong with me so, if you differ, then you must change."
There is always a right and a wrong with these people and the
wrong is exclusively found within those who are not like them.
Here the hypocrisy of the diversity brigade is self-evident. There
are few better illustrations of this belief system than in Dowd's
obsession with men. She attempts to undermine us constantly
due to the fact that we deviate from the female ideal.
Many of her pieces are usually just one long whine about why
men have to be the way we are. A more complex persona would
have the sophistication to accept that men and women are
different and we might as well accept it. The whole "you change"
outlook is completely anathema to any reasonable approach of
analyzing "the other," which, in this case, is the opposite sex.
Such a stance is repugnant to living a productive life. Men will
never be women and women will never be men, and that is the
way it should, and must, be. Just move on, Maureen. If you do,
you can begin to make sense of the world around you.
Whimpering that other people just don't get it, is merely a form
of outrageous conceit, which Maureen has in abundance. I have
developed an austere measure of how best to spend one's
waking moments and call it "The Celebrity Test." It is composed
of a single question:
"What is so interesting about me that I must waste time fixating
upon my person everyday?"
If your answer to the question is "not very much" then chances
are you are a lucid human being with a healthy approach towards
life. If your answer was "everything," then you should send in an
application to The New York Times and make a career out of
cajoling others to adapt to your neediness and feelings of
rejection and failure.
Bernard Chapin is a writer living in Chicago. He can be reached
at bchapafl@hotmail.com.
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